EDGAR NOMINATED CRIME WRITER

So You Want To Publish A Novel

In the past week I’ve visited a lovely writers’ group in Drogheda and taught a crime-writing workshop in a converted church, and at both events I brought along my plotting poster for the third and final draft of Distress Signals. Its four different coloured sheets of A4 card taped together at the creases, one for each part (Act I, Act II Part 1, Act II Part 2, Act III), and each one is covered in Post-Its, scribbles, reminders, instructions and scene summaries. You might have seen pictures of it on this blog before. Whenever I unfold it in a room of writers, it always gets greeted with the same noise: a collective Oooh. I don’t know if it’s because people are impressed, or terrified, or wondering how I ever actually wrote the book seeing as I spent so much time messing around with sticky notes and marker pens.

There’s less than a fortnight to go now to our Inspiration Project presents Refreshers Week event here in Dublin and this morning I thought I should post a short video of my messy, sprawling master plan and then the small, neat, lovely book that was the eventual product of it. The tutorial I’m teaching on the day, The Dreaded Synopsis, should help bridge the gap – and that’s what I was going to say when I posted the video.

Except I started thinking that, actually, the book started with an article in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, and there was a lot of coffee involved, and a number of drafts…

And then, well, let’s just say I got a bit carried away.

So here is everything you need to get published, or how I got from dream to Dagger award. (Spot my plotting poster.) Enjoy! A handful of tickets are still available for our Inspiration Project event. You can find out more here.

(Okay, so yes, I am blogging again after a six month break. But-but-but… I’m finally done with college and the worst part of Book 3, i.e. the first draft, is done too, so hopefully it won’t be another six months before I blog again.)

Thank you SO much for the recent interview on the The Bestseller Experiment podcast. It was SO inspiring to me, to hear you struggle through the same aversion-to-actually-writing issues that I do—yet have come out the other side. You’ve given me hope.

One thing: Your video of your “messy, sprawling master plan” is not working. The error message says “This video is not available.” I really want to see it, and was wondering if you could make it available again?